The Long Defeat (4) by Sorina Higgins

Lewis jumped up, strode to the front of the room, and
pounded his huge fist on the lectern.

“We shall not give in!” he bellowed. “Though they set
their boots and drive their tanks on our English soil, we shall not give in!
Have we not the power of the great stories on our side, the myths and the
legends and the fairy tales, the encounters with dragons, the battles with
sorcerers, the recurring victory of spring over winter in every land, the dying
and rising god who is torn to pieces but comes to life again? These are the
stories on which our children were fed from their earliest days, the stories
that were in the hearts of our boys when they marched across Europe, the
stories that are at the foundation of the wisdom we teach in this place. Surely
those tales of unexpected victory and of unlooked-for return should rally our
hearts and the hearts of English youth to hope and to resistance?”

The others looked up at him, light returning to their
eyes. All the books they knew and loved poured back into their minds: the
hopeless battles, the unlikely heroes, the swift turns of fortune at the end of
the tale.

“The eucatastrophe,” Tolkien murmured.

The others nodded.

“What do you think we should do, Jack?” Barfield
asked.

“We could form a secret society and promulgate these
truths in the true fellowship,” Williams suggested.

“No, no, no,” Lewis cut in. “It must be public. Let us
use those avenues that have worked before for spreading truth. The schools, the
radio, and the press.”

“But is there time?” Barfield wondered. “It takes time
to write books, to publish books, to arrange speaking engagements, to record
broadcasts.”

“Then we must move swiftly,” Lewis said.

“The world is changing,” Tolkien hummed to himself. “I
can feel it in the waters. I can sense it in the air.”

“We shall do it,” Williams said, bowing his head in a
gesture that turned his pronoun royal. “We shall gather the stories into
propinquity and promulgate them to the far corners of the kingdom.”

“I’ll talk to the BBC,” Lewis said.

“I’ll talk to the OUP,” Williams said.

“I’ll talk to the Chancellor,” Tolkien said.

“I’ll arrange the financing,” Barfield said.

And so it was settled, and they got to work.

Over the next few weeks, while Hitler imprisoned or
shot all the members of the British government, blew up Big Ben, and
established the ministers of the Third Reich in the Houses of Parliament, the
Inklings worked feverishly from their Oxford rooms. Lewis scheduled a series of
talks on the BBC about “Forgiveness and Resistance” and scrambled to write his
own notes and schedule guest lecturers. The German High Command seized Blenheim
Palace, metaphorically throwing out Winston Churchill’s body before it was
cold, and twisted that ancient castle into their central headquarters.

Williams
stayed up all night, many nights in a row, writing pamphlets with such titles
as “The Image of the Invaded City,” “The Figure of the Führer,” “The Defeated
Way of Exchange,” and “The Theology of Surrender.” He passed these along to his
colleagues at the Oxford University Press, who worked long hours, printing them
nearly before he had finished writing them. Hitler vivisected the United
Kingdom and Ireland into six military-economic segments, passing each to one of
his trusted administrators, giving them total control over search, seizure,
arrests, and “liquidations.”

Tolkien arranged for a meeting of the
combined—remaining—English faculty, then labored over a lecture in which he
would blend the historical with the present, the mythological with the actual,
agonizing over details of etymology and chronology, discarding them time and
time again, starting again, and meandering off on long sidetracks of purely
philological interest or topographical precision. All over England, armed
civilian resistance arose, farmers and shop workers wielding pitchforks and
spanners against assault rifles and machine guns. These were obliterated so
fast they didn’t even make it into the news.

Barfield, with speed and panache,
darted back into occupied London, scurrying through the deserted Underground
tunnels like a literary mouse, popping aboveground into the offices of lawyers
and bank managers, securing his own and his friends’ small collective wealth
before the tyrants could seize all assets. Mrs. Tolkien and Mrs. Barfield took
in more and more refugees, their homes bursting, and they and their husbands
read fairy tales to the wide-eyed flocks every evening. Lewis also read to his
house full of frightened refugee children, saying:

“Since they will soon meet cruel enemies, let them at
least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Let them know stories of
wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let
villains be soundly killed at the end of the book.”

Not satisfied with only the radio program, Lewis
dashed off a new children’s story and an adult spiritual fantasy, both with
allegorical import or at least thematic applicability to the dire situation his
nation faced. Williams shuttled those off to the Press, too, and they were
rattling merrily along through the printing process, when—

Everything stopped.

The printing presses stopped. The radio broadcasts
stopped. The meetings of the Oxford faculty stopped. Hitler had seized control
of them all.

Although not one German soldier or administrator had
yet set foot in Oxford, the long arm of the Nazi’s political machine reached
even there. By means of subtle—and not-so-subtle—threats, the seizure of bank
accounts, the liquidation of other financial assets, the placement of
personnel, and strategic arrests, the Third Reich had maneuvered itself into
positions of power in every cultural institution in the nation. All broadcasts
and all books scheduled for printing had to be passed by the Minister of
Propaganda. All lectures and tutorials at the great Medieval universities were
canceled, pending the colleges’ transformation into military training schools.
Lewis’s rooms were boarded up. The flagstone corridors lay silent, awaiting the
moment when they would ring to the sound of marching boots.

At Lewis’s house in Headington, a suburb of Oxford,
the Inklings gathered in his gloomy, ash-bestrewn living room. This time, there
were no drinks at all, not even one cigarette among them. They sat quietly this
time. No one made jokes. No one sang songs. No one danced on the table or the
floor. They were gathered around the wireless, listening to a broadcast in
German, and Tolkien was translating it for them, sporadically, sometimes
sinking into morose silence until one of the others roused him again and asked
what Hitler was saying. It was all the now-familiar rhetoric about the “Final
Solution” ushering in world peace, about the “Master Race” establishing its
rightful superiority over all the earth, about “High culture” reigning the
earth at last, ushering in a golden age. Tolkien choked on many of the phrases,
coughing them out as though their taste was revolting on his tongue. The
Führer’s speech ended, accompanied by a patter of rhythmical applause, and the
four men shook themselves and looked miserably into one another’s eyes.

Then a voice in English came on the radio, heavily
accented but clear.

“As you have just heard from our great Führer,” it
said, “each nation will be ushered into the New Order in the way most fitting
to its culture. Some have embraced the Führer as their longed-for savior.
Others, emerging from centuries of oppression, are misguided and confused. They
have attempted resistance. They will be brought in by liberation from their
false ideologies and corrupt leaders.

“England is one of these.”

“Of course,” whispered Barfield.

“Now, you can hear behind me,” the voice went on, “the
sound of marching feet. Members of the Gestapo are leading onto the platform
here outside of Westminster Abbey the last tyrant of a unified Europe: Albert
Frederick Arthur George, known until today as King George VI.”

The four men sucked in their breath and sat up
straight, staring at the radio.

“He is here with the members of his family: his wife,
Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and their two daughters, eighteen-year-old Elizabeth
and fourteen-year-old Margaret. They have been lined up along the stage, and
the Führer is speaking to each one of them. I am too far away to hear what he
is saying, but it looks as if he is giving them his blessing.”

“Blessing, my arse,” Lewis snorted.

“The Führer has stepped aside now,” said the
announcer, “and it looks as if he has asked if the former King of England wants
to say anything.”

“Former,” Williams noted.

A little silence fell from the radio, interrupted only
by small shuffling and coughing sounds from the great crowd gathered outside
Westminster Abbey to watch their King stand before Adolf Hitler.

Then four shots rang out, sharp, shocking, in quick
succession.

The crowd broke into screams, shrieks, and howls of
agony, and the four men gathered around the radio yelled, too, and leaped out
of their chairs.

“Thus ends the life of the last tyrant of our times,”
the calm German voice said. “Europe is now one!”